Dedication Address by Lord Rosebery

"Fellow countrymen, fellow citizens of Dumfries, and fellow-admirers of Burns, we are assembled today to perform a sacred duty.   We are assembled to unveil to the free air of heaven the effigy of your noblest citizen.   It is true that there is no need of any memorial of Burns in Dumfries.  The years he spent here, his bones repose here, are sufficient memorials of that immortal man.   While your town exists it is his shrine, and his reputation is a part of the very air you breathe.   Nevertheless, it was well done to raise this statue to him here, that everyone of you as you pass to your daily avocations may remember that in this country no disadvantage of birth or position or fortune can act as a real hindrance to genius; while your very children as they pass to school may remember that fierce passion of acquisition which made Burns seize hold upon knowledge and made him prince among men.  

For, he was a prince among men – not an angel or a saint, but a prince among men.  Recite against him all his faults and weaknesses, urge against him all that the most rigid moralist may urge, you will find that it is precisely the character of his career, that it is himself, which gives his poetry distinctive interest.   If Burns were an impersonal name, if we knew nothing whatever about him, if they had been written by some impeachable magistrate or some correct Commissioner of Supply, we should say that his poems were marvellous, unequalled for fertility, for richness and for variety; but the poet would not have been the name that charms all the world.   It is because he was emphatically a Man, putting his genius aside, a man like one of us, because we can trace all his transparent torments of struggle and remorse; it is because we see him struggling in an impossible situation, like a war-horse in a morass, because above all he had as his mainspring of action a love and a sympathy with suffering mankind – it is for this that his memory is to us as the memory of a dead brother; and it is because of this tumult and simplicity and passion of life, as flung into immortal verse, that we love his poetry as much as we admire him.

Loving much, he is loved, and it is love which inspires his verse.  From his simple poem to Nelly Kirkpatrick, who worked with him in the fields, which he composed in an enthusiasm of passion, down to the last touching words that he composed on his death-bed, 'O’ wert thou in the cauld blast?' every word that he wrote was inspired by love of his kind.   Nor was his love limited only to humanity.   He sings of his horse; he sings of his dog; he sings of the poor mouse that his plough turns up in a field.  Nothing in the world is alien to him except pomp, or fraud, or oppression.   He cherishes all the simple inhabitants of a world too hard for them, as it was for him.  It is for this that his poetry is so universally beloved; it is for this that his sympathies reach beyond the grave; and because every toiler in the world may claim a share in the poems of Burns.  He was born, as you know, in 1759, and died in this town in 1796.  So short was the interval between the cradle of so much obscurity and the grave of so much achievement.  There was another notable birth in that year. A month or two afterwards the greatest man in England, the virtual Prime Minister, Lord Chatham, had a son.   The little Pitt and the little Burns set out into the world at the same time.  The one was destined to be Prime Minister of Great Britain; the other was destined to be a peasant all his life.   One lived on the solitary summit of power; the other in the lonely eminence of genius.  Both died harassed with debt; both died with reputations of lives shortened by excess; both died of a broken heart.  The one lived a gigantic life, warred and struggled with giants, was a name of terror throughout the world.  The other was hardly known outside his own little country.   But, posterity has redressed the balance.   The Pitt clubs are dissolved; the Pitt banquets are over; the Pitt anniversaries are no more observed.   But, there is no quarter of the globe, and not a year passes, in which the memory of the Ayrshire poet is not honoured.  

Eight months only before he died, and while he lay a few miles from his deathbed, there was born an Elisha on whom part of his mantle should fall.  I mean Thomas Carlyle.   He was destined to be perhaps the fittest interpreter of Burns; he was destined to be a great poet himself.   It would seem that Providence was unwilling that Dumfriesshire should cease for a moment to be the home of genius; for rarely in this world the birth and death of genius occurred so close to each other in point of place and of time.  There is an analogy, too, between Burns and Carlyle - they both owed much to their father.  Carlyle has given a striking picture of his, which might also stand for the father of Burns.   The father of Burns was the ‘cotter’ of the ‘Saturday Night,’ ‘the saint the father, and the husband’.   And, while Scotland can produce such fathers, we need have no fears for her sons.  I am speaking of Burns today as a man, and not as a poet.   It is not possible to say much, and this is not the place to speak of his poetry; for I am speaking in Scotland, and the poetry of Burns is the birthright of Scotsmen.   But, I may say this, that the hackneyed word “inspiration” is as true of Burns as it is of Shakespeare.  His poems do seem to be the direct fruit of inspiration, and that marvellous twenty-seventh year of his, in which he poured forth an apparently irrepressible burst of song, stands forth unique in all the centuries of verse.  

But, gentlemen, the man himself is the central figure today.   He, himself, if we may believe all testimony, was grater than his poems.   His conversation was said by the great men who heard it to be even more marvellous than his works.   His appearance had every sign and token of genius.   His bearing revealed the man he was.   He came from failure; he came from ruin; he came prepared to emigrate; he came from every sort of domestic trouble; he came a peasant to Edinburgh, and was at once the lion and the centre of the most brilliant society that Edinburgh ever produced.   Gentlemen, to this great man, to this great poet, we dedicate this statue in Dumfries today.   And yet there is no sadder record than the record of his life in Dumfries.  A gentleman often narrated that when he rode into Dumfries on a fashionable night he found all the respectability of Dumfries on one side of the street and Burns himself shunned and avoided on the other.  When the friend asked the reason, Burns recited the two verses from Lady Grizel Baillie’s ballad which end with the line:

“And were na my heart licht I wad dee”

And his heart was not light, and he did die.   Is there a sadder picture than this – this darling of the most brilliant society scouted and neglected in his own town, with his wife in the most tender of situations, with all agonies of distress around him, his deathbed disturbed and gloomy?"

THE DISTURBANCE AND NOISE OF THE CROWD AT THIS JUNCTURE WAS SO GREAT THAT LORD ROSEBERY WAS OBLIGED TO PULL THE CORD AND UNVEIL THE STATUE.   BUT< HIS LORDSHIP WAS DETERMINED TO CONCLUDE HIS POINT AND CONTINUED

“There is the image of the man who once stood shunned in your streets, to stand there for ever as the glory of your burgh.   The respectable who shunned him have disappeared; his troubles, his sorrows, his faults his failings have vanished.   The troubles of his life are no more; the clouds that surrounded his death-bed have disappeared; but his memory, his triumph, his tomb abide with you for ever.”